Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Some thoughts on Social Media!! IT'S GREAT

I've been working as a musician for a few years now, and have mostly just stumbled onto things that have worked to build recognition and my fan base.The newest things that I have been intentionally working on are in the area of online social media and marketing.

Twitter has become an AMAZING resource for me as a musician combined with using the software HootSuite. This is a great way to build friends, fans and more recognition. I've met some amazing social net work gurus who have already invented the wheel, I've connected with some of them and have asked a few questions, now I just have to apply it to my life and business.

In Particular, HootSuite has been great to link me to all my social net works, such as Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Facebook Pages. The software is simple to use and connects you to your status updates in all those applications."It's a one stop status update shop!" and I can designate which status get updates and with what particular content. This has saved me time and has made my 'alive and active' presence known, which in turn has connected me to more people. I've only been tweeting for a short time and have seen how my tweet from my city in Victoria Canada was retweeted by a woman in Nashville USA and then retweeted again by another organization in Nashville. These happen over and over again.Music and promotion isn't the only thing I talk about on Twitter either, I am a real person with ideas, stories, jokes, questions just like everyone else. So in 140 characters or less, I can share some pretty neat ideas, and have some fun.

I also use Reverbnation as my main music website. This free software is amazing, again easy to use and the features it has are to many to list. It also is connected to Twitter and I am able to update my twitter, facebook and myspace from within Reverbnation too. I wish I could encourage more musicians to catch on to this amazing free software and sign up. So easy to use and as I said covers so many areas that a musicaian needs. Once all your information is inputed, it's done and It allows the musician to focus on being that, a musician.

Lastly I have found the more the applications and software connects to each other the closer your connection and online presence becomes huge.I have added as many connected links to each site so that they connect each other. So CDBABY, ReverbNation, my Blog, Website, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Myspace LASTFM.com, NUMUBU.com are all connected to each other in at least one way and some 7 ways. Putting in this effort to work hard connecting all my dots is really paying off, I have almost doubled my fan base on Reverbnation, increased my followers on Twitter and made some amazing new friends online from all over the world!